on the survival, and a permission of continued struggle to
the unfit, cuts off the natural avenue of progress for their more fit
competitors. So long as the crude industrial struggle is permitted on
these unnatural terms, the effective organization and progress of the
main body of low-skilled workers seems a logical impossibility. If the
upper strata of low-class workers are enabled to organize, and, what is
more difficult, to protect themselves against incursions of outsiders,
the position of the lower strata will become even more hopeless and
helpless. If one by one all the avenues of regular low-skilled labour
are closed by securing a practical monopoly of this and that work for
the members of a Union, the superfluous body of labourers will be driven
more and more to depend on irregular jobs, and forced more and more into
concentrated masses of city dwellers, will present an ever-growing
difficulty and danger to national order and national health.
Consideration of the general progress of the working-classes has no
force to set aside this problem. It seems not unlikely that we are
entering on a new phase of the poverty question. The upper strata of
low-skilled labour are learning to organize. If they succeed in forming
and maintaining strong Unions, that is to say, in lifting themselves
from the chaotic struggle of an earlier industrial epoch, so as to get
fairly on the road of modern industrial progress, the condition of those
left behind will press the illogicality of our present national economy
upon us with a dramatic force which will be more convincing than logic,
for it will appeal to a growing national sentiment of pity and humanity
which will take no denial, and will find itself driven for the first
time to a serious recognition of poverty as a national, industrial
disease, requiring a national, industrial remedy.

The great problem of poverty thus resides in the conditions of the low-
skilled workman. To live industrially under the new order he must
organize. He cannot organize because he is so poor, so ignorant, so
weak. Because he is not organized he continues to be poor, ignorant,
weak. Here is a great dilemma, of which whoever shall have found the key
will have done much to solve the problem of poverty.

List of Authorities.

By far the most valuable general work of reference upon _Problems of
Poverty_ is Charles Booth's _Labour and Life of the People_ (Williams &
Norgate). By the side of this